Wordpress or Joomla? For most web developers working in a commercial environment the choice of open-source content management system (CMS) platform will be simple: Joomla. It’s more powerful, flexible and it doesn’t come with the baggage of being the publishing engine of every armchair webmaster around the world.

From a marketing standpoint, that view is a pain in the digital backside. I’ve been wrestling with the many-headed beast that is multivariate testing for a client this week, and Joomla has thrown a saboteur’s spanner in the works at every turn.

What is multivariate testing?
In the fight to improve your website conversions – which I hope is a struggle you never take a break from, whether you’re running a local charity, an Adsense-funded blog or a global online business, and whether you consider yourself a marketing or an IT person – multivariate testing is the front line.

It’s where the battle will be won and lost. And your choice of CMS platform – web-developer trendy Joomla or mass-appeal Wordpress – could be critical.

To put it simply, multivariate testing lets you try different things in different versions of your website. It takes the direct marketing principle of test and learn and amplifies it in the online environment.

Say you can’t decide where to put a “buy now” button on your book sale website. Using multivariate testing you can try it in a load of different places – all at the same time, because different users will see different versions of your site – and the results of your experiments will demonstrate where the best place is.

How powerful is that? It can make an organisation’s ROI from their website and other digital activites rocket. It’s marketing gold dust. It’s… well, test it out for yourself!

Google Web Optimizer – free and fantastically powerful
Google Web Optimizer is a free tool that, like most things Google does in this space, is fantastically powerful. There are paid-for tools as well but if you use Google Analytics to measure your web traffic you may as well start with Web Optimizer as well – they dovetail together marvellously.

You can do simple A/B splits – measuring two different versions of a page against each other – or more complicated experiments that test a number of different components on a page.

A limitation with all PHP-based CMS systems, including Wordpress, Joomla and Expression Engine (my personal favourite), is that Web Optimizer uses javascript to change the appearance of web pages after your CMS has spat them out, so testing PHP-generated content isn’t simple. You have to hard-code a lot of stuff, which is less than ideal.

Wordpress or Joomla?
But once you’ve dealt with that problem, it’s a breeze doing the rest – if you’re using Wordpress. You install snippets of script in your template files, tell Google what you want in each variant, and Bob – Robert, Dave, Tracy, whatever; you can test which works best – is your uncle.

Multivariate testing in Joomla, on the other hand, is a battle royale. The complex way it organises page structures – with menus, articles, modules, items and so on – involves a heck of a lot more PHP. And that means a heck of a lot more hard coding – or just bits that you cannot test.

The kicker? There’s a Wordpress plug-in that does most of the hard Web Optimizer work for you (download the multivariate testing plug-in here). No such component exists for Joomla to the best of my knowledge.

But the techies like Joomla. So the rift between IT and marketing departments is unlikely to heal any time soon. And so the war goes on.